


shine a light through the distance

by PurpleLex



Series: Dreams & Lasts [4]
Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Dog Fighting (mentioned), Dreams and Nightmares, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Frank Castle POV, Heavy Angst, Murder, Violence, Wilson Fisk (mentioned) - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-19
Updated: 2017-08-19
Packaged: 2018-12-17 08:16:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11847588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PurpleLex/pseuds/PurpleLex
Summary: “You sure about that?” He asks, incredulous, but she doesn’t give an inch. “You help me, you’ll only get blood on your hands.”“I already have blood on my hands.”She almost had his on hers half a year ago by force of a bullet.He put his blood on her hands just a month ago by force of a plea.“Doesn’t mean you need any more,” is all he says before opening the door.





	shine a light through the distance

**Author's Note:**

> [ Frank POV retelling Part 2, complimentary to "leaving is my last option" ]
> 
> Remember when I said I’d be posting this like a week after the last part? HAH. Never trust me when it comes to time, I’m the literal worst…. 
> 
> I think I'm MORE terrified about this part than the last and I'm sooo unbelievably sorry about the time it took to get these finished but if you've stuck around to read it, thank you so so much and I hope it's actually okay!! Also, I'm disclaimering now that I haven't read much of The Punisher comics where Micro is present, and I have seen from the casting and some fan comments that the show's rendition of Micro might be more different than not anyway, so I just went my own way with him?? I'm so sorry if it's terrible....
> 
> Obligatory mention to maybe skim Karen's companion part or parts to compare and contrast them~

 

 

Frank explores the patchwork of stitches and bandages that cover his skin while Karen showers.  

He vaguely remembers telling her to call Red yesterday when she’d found him, but everything after that is pitched black, this handiwork of the nurse he hasn’t even properly met serving as his only answer. As much as he’s looking forward to being out of this apartment as soon as possible, he isn’t exactly eager for the way that the devil will almost certainly be waiting for him with another sermon at the ready.

And this time he’s betting that prodding questions are also going to be in the arsenal of morality with questions undoubtedly more uncomfortable than usual. Considering how good Red is at sensing when that weakness flares up, he’d prefer to avoid the whole thing altogether. 

He wonders now if Red leveled any of those questions at Karen herself. Questions about helping him, about his presence, about trust and protection.

His jaw clenches.

Karen emerges, looking the same as always, only now he gets to watch her put together the finishing touches. He shouldn’t be doing this — the _studying_ — but it’s a curious thing, getting a peek into someone’s habits, and it draws him in, a practice he can’t quit.

The black coat’s fetched from a hook behind the door, the only jacket there. Heels are picked up from inside a small closet and there’s only four other pairs of shoes he can spy tucked away, squinting a moment at the way they’re kicked haphazardly inside. Her bag’s on the table, another loner all by itself. 

He considers her as she fusses with the coffee pot.

Minimalistic, not materialistic. Handful of staples that get reused to death in her possession. There’s some touches tossed around, touches of sentimentality and loving decoration, but it’s overwhelmingly more resembling a base than a home. The messiest spot is her desk, out of necessity, and he briefly notices patterned paper boxes stacked on the shelves near it with half their lids askew, labels scrawled with what appear to be dates across them.

There’s not a single photograph in sight.

It strikes him as remarkably close to being a feminine version of his own spaces — minus the stockpiles of weaponry he keeps — and that thought sits uneasily in his head.

She’s walking over then, second cup in hand, and he’s reaching out eagerly for the fix. Accidentally, he rests his fingers over hers as he slides it into his grip. They’re soft. A memory of holding her hands in his flutters through his mind’s eye, a memory of panic and tears and _caring_ too much, almost forgotten from the haze of blood loss.

He dips his head, staring out the window as a prickly sense of shame blooms within.

“ _Promise me_ , Frank, that you aren’t going to try hobbling out of here before I get back.”

He’s got half a mind on that idea, half of a _serious_ mind, all at once feeling as if he’s both suffocating and violating. He keeps his mouth shut.

She shifts on her feet. “It’s not like you can make it very far on that leg to begin with, but I wouldn’t put it past you to _try_.”

It’s half-muttered, but it takes him by surprise, a wisp of a laugh escaping before his lungs cut off and his thoughts make him frown. She knows him well, and for a moment it’s as if he never asked her to stay away from him, never left that diner. They’ve shifted leagues apart and yet changed so little at the same time. 

He knows why he’s this way, why he’s here near her now, but figuring out what she’s thinking is a code he has yet to fully decipher, although he continually tries. Even when he shouldn’t.

“I mean it,” Karen says stiffly. It almost comes off as a threat.

But it’s not, not really, because he can hear the anxiety hovering underneath. He thinks of seawater tears and shaking fingers again. 

With a swallow, he nods and resigns himself to making the vow.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

His first observations were right: there are no pictures of family on display.

The question of it sits on his shoulders as he keeps a hand pressed to the walls, stumbling around her things like a bewitched explorer. He slept again, for more than a couple hours, with a blessedly empty subconscious letting him get close to feeling a modicum of peace. It ends up feeling fleeting, though — it always does.

Frank worked on regaining his capabilities afterwards. At the very least, he had to be able to get back to the bathroom on his own. He rests against the table now, more winded than he’d like as his right leg throbs violently in pain, but he just tunes it out.

She’s fond of sketches.

While there’s no photographs, there’s quite a few small pieces of art hanging on her walls, and even though the frames are eclectic as hell, there’s a theme within of sketched flowers, landscapes, houses. It’s _quaint_. Soothing. It’s just another layer he shouldn’t know about her, shouldn’t be curious enough to discover, but he is anyway, and his lips twitch slightly. 

It fits her perfectly. 

There’s no reason to, and yet he files that piece of information in the back of his head for pointless safekeeping before lumbering over to the pill bottle she left on the nightstand. 

He hates these, but right now what he hates more is upsetting her. So he takes them.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“You’re an extra large, right?”

He has to focus not to stumble out of confusion. The right leg’s started to scream at him now, deciding that this time is one too many to be back on his feet as he tries to feel more useful than he is, greeting her return. “Excuse me?”

Karen removes a pile of clothes from a shopping bag and dumps them unceremoniously into his arms, makes him stop from stepping closer as he puts all his energy into staying upright. His gaze flickers between the pile and her. “I know, you’re probably not a sweatpants kind of guy, but _I was not_ going to spend an hour trying to figure out how men’s jean sizes work, so you have to deal with this.”

He doesn’t bother trying to hide the surprise. Staring at the now numerous clothing options in his arms, Frank opens his mouth without thinking. “No underwear?” 

It’s a soft tease, and he _definitely_ shouldn’t do that either, but his head’s a touch fuzzy from the narcotics and he hasn’t missed the way she came in with straight shoulders and skittering eyes.

Either she doesn’t notice, or she’s far more stressed than he’d hoped for, too stressed for this tête-à-tête as she reminds him of how just 24 hours before he’d been getting started on filling her bathtub with blood. It’s not a harsh reminder, but his mind clears a much-needed touch. “Fair enough.” 

He turns away. 

“Thank you, ma’am.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

Frank Jr.’s demanding yet another Sesame Street impression as his little hands grapple for the edge of the counter, reaching to scale the height, and Frank’s shooed him away half a dozen times already but his boy’s determination makes him laugh and cave. Scooping him up and setting him down on the counter has Frank Jr. grinning wide, but he doesn’t forget, asks again, and Frank caves with that, too. 

It’s ridiculous, and he doesn’t need Maria to come back into the room to tell him just how dumb he sounds, or warn that his throat might get sore again if he keeps doing this all the time, but pitching his voice low and speaking crazy like this makes Frank Jr. entranced with joy as Lisa stands near, whisking the dough with intense concentration, tongue stuck out from the effort. She’s got something important to do it for — maybe a bake sale, or maybe it’s a friend’s party — and she’s going to tire of it soon, tire of the whisking and the measuring and the waiting she insisted on doing all herself after he puts the first pan in the oven for her. 

She’s going to tire of it, just as Frank Jr.’s going to tire of this puppet impression once Frank runs out of phrases in his head while he ruffles his boy’s hair, but for now time isn’t relevant, the moment lasting uninterrupted — until, with a blink, it’s gone.

He’s staring up at the ceiling in the next second and this time he doesn’t have any waiting period of figuring out where he is. He just knows.

Karen’s snoring. 

It’s more of a hum than anything, so quiet that he has to listen a few beats until he figures out what it is as it rises and falls steadily. He lets her lull the instinct to move that’s trying to itch up the inside of his spine, the urge that always rears its ugly head after a dream. Instead, his mind drifts unrestrained to when they ate on her couch, watched familiar programs, and talked through memories like the one still lingering, pressing against the back of his eyes.

It could be unsettling, the way she was capable of doing that — the _prompting_. The understanding she gave as he sought to reclaim stolen moments that had been locked away tightly inside shredded gray matter. 

It would be unsettling if she was _aware_ of it, but Frank doubts she really is. She gives all the right looks, distance, and asks all the right questions until he’s remembering more than he ever has on his own, until he’s consumed with fondness and longing of days gone past. A longing that in these rare minutes is just dull enough to not leave him the same as a gutted fish.

The nightmares are a fact of his life now, a fact to be filed away along with everything else. They are something he can’t change but rather simply has to accept. The soft dreams, though, the ones that bathe in yellow light and easy smiles, one step closer to perfection than their reality ever was — those are what make him tense. 

It’s foreboding and feels awfully close to being a warning.

A warning not to relax, not ever again.

Yet he is, bit by bit, can sense it within new fibers of his being as more time passes, and he’s powerless to stop it. Frank knows the logical and the illogical arguments against it, the emotional and the cold, but there’s a _yearning_ here that he has no control over. Hasn’t since it started God knows when over the past couple of months.

And it’s winning.

The dream was a direct consequence of the walk down memory lane Karen helped him with a few hours earlier, but even though it twisted his heart as if a knife sits perpetually lodged within, he can’t manage to regret a minute of it.

He wipes the sheen of dampness from his eyes and finds himself watching the rise and fall of Karen’s back as he warily slips under a slightly-less-disturbed slumber.

 

 

* * *

 

 

He changes his own bandages.

They don’t have to discuss it, not in the way they’d sort of argued about sleeping arrangements — she was right, of course, that him staying on her short excuse for a couch in the state he’s in was a terrible idea by conventional standards, but she doesn’t know how he’s been minimally existing just fine the last six months and she’s too stubborn to recognize any potential awkwardness in sharing a bed, even if they aren’t sharing sheets — because somehow this is _different_.

Frank doesn’t ask, more than capable of doing it himself, and Karen doesn’t offer either. 

She can ask how he’s feeling every morning and night, she can surreptitiously check the pills she doesn’t think he notices her keeping track of, and she can make note of the scarlet splotches that bleed through his clothes less and less with each passing day. But that’s all something else entirely. Something almost clinical.

Her eyes never linger long on the bruises and scrapes within view, yet a frown always tugs at her lips afterwards. She knows when he’s re-patching himself, can see it through the cracked bathroom door if she tries, but her back stays turned every time and nothing but curt comments about him needing more rest greet him when he walks out. She buys more of the gauze he’s starting to run low on one evening without him having to let her know.

Quivering limbs and skin dotted with blood come to mind.

Concern. Fear. It’s own sort of sympathetic pain.

He checks the stitching along his non-dominant shoulder as the faint sounds of her shuffling papers fills the background with a fast-becoming-familiar ambience. The cut is starting to come together, slowly, and it’ll leave a nasty scar he would’ve once given a shit about, but now he only reapplies ointment to prevent any infection and wraps it back up.

It’s hard for him to recall if Maria ever truly cared about the scars or not. 

He always _thought_ she would, that much he does know, and so he would try his damnedest to speed along his body’s already abnormally fast healing, but in the moments after he returned home, after he’d played with Lisa and Frank Jr., after he had Maria in his arms and all she did was hold him close and stare at him for a long minute as if she was memorizing him anew….Did she fret over the new scars then. 

He tries to recall anything else deeper within those fleeting moments, but all that greets him is the static of erasure, as if he has a burnt film reel in his head, spinning and spinning with nothing else left to display despite the countless frames continuing to roll in front of the lens.

It’s far too expected to raise even a wisp of frustration anymore.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The patterned boxes hold her research.

Almost a week passes of him milling around Karen’s apartment, alternatively sleeping, checking his contacts via phone, and disassembling and reassembling his weapons before he decides to feed curiously and find out what the dates on their labels mean. He’s read enough of her stories to know that every slip of paper here is a piece of information that didn’t get made public in its entirety.

This is a breach of privacy. He recognizes that, at least, but a part of Frank considers that if she gets mad about it, the only thing she might do is kick him out, and that’s not exactly an unwelcome prospect. It’s probably fucked up how much he’s looking for an excuse for her to think ill of him, too.

It’s what he deserves from her instead of…whatever it is exactly that this understanding between them entirely entails right now.

She’s good at it, the research, and it quiets the continual bouncing anxiety within him, reading page after page, making note after note of his own, until he’s hearing her heels click down the hall. He waits for a comment about it, waits for the standard greeting if she decides to dismiss it when she swings the door open.

“You could have told me,” is all Karen says before hanging up her purse, and he flicks his eyes over to her. She’s tense again today, but it’s different this time.

There’s a lot he could tell her now, a lot he could have told her before. The accusation is too vague for Frank to do more than await further explanation. 

“ _Fisk_.” She flinches as she says it, and that’s a piece of the puzzle that makes up Karen Page that he didn’t expect, but the fear there makes him clench his jaw. 

It doesn’t take much thought at all to figure out who’d reveal that to her, the fucking devil managing to find a way to make his life more difficult even while he’s out of commission, but he takes a minute to consider how much of that revelation she knows. 

That Fisk is Kingpin? That he’s the one responsible for the parolee stories she’s been writing? That he put a hit out on her for those very stories?

Whatever part of those questions she doesn’t know he decides can’t hurt her. They’d only make her more angry, more determined. And more afraid. He puts a considerable amount of effort into keeping his voice neutral. “Red finally caved, huh?”

“Not without some pushing,” she mutters, and he snorts at that, turns back to the desk in a feeble attempt at dismissal. “Nothing?”

Her voice is tight, indignant. He closes his eyes for a moment. “What do you want, you want a medal?” He asks, and it’s cruel, but all he feel is the throbbing in his leg that keeps him limping, the pain killer blur affecting his head, and how even when he had all his faculties, he’d barely been able to keep her safe from Fisk a month ago. 

Never mind that he’d utterly failed and underestimated the shit she’d get herself into with a harmless tenement case. 

“Congratulations, you’ve figured out the head of the snake, now you can run headfirst faster into getting your head blown off. Great, fucking _fantastic_.”

Her voice catches. “Jesus, Frank.”

“The Punisher taking down felons, that’s all anyone’s got to know,” he says firmly, but he can hear the desperation in his own voice. Fingers twitch over the papers in front of him but he can’t begin to pretend to be really focusing on them. “That’s all you got to write.” 

“But that’s not all the story _is_.”

“ _Christ_ , you’re like a pit bull.” 

He could laugh but he doesn’t because he’s too wound up wanting to fight her on that belief, even as he gets it. And he does — he _does_ understand it. It’s respectable and it’s admirable and it’s what makes her already one of the best of her field. It’s what made her give him the time of day before when no one else would, and he’s compelled to be grateful for that because if she wasn’t this way, if she didn’t possess that iron will, he wouldn’t have found the truth about that day in the park. About his family.

But it’s that belief that keeps her in the middle of danger, that has her walking a razor-thin tight rope between the corrupted and the corruptors, and it’s not his place to protect her, to want to protect her, and yet. Here he is.

She can keep herself safer than most, he has no doubt, can’t have any doubt on that when he’s seen it over and over himself. 

But there’s limits to everything.

Karen’s been standing by the door, arms crossed, staring at the back of his head with enough force that she might as well be pressing her nails into his collar to try to make him acknowledge her again. She waits, but he doesn’t give, so she waves a hand and sighs under her breath. 

“You better put those back in the right order when you’re done with them.”

A question about what her latest project is waits on his tongue but he doesn’t open his mouth. It’s not his business, and he didn’t need to be told that, but regardless she’d already said so herself not that long ago. Whatever she thought, however she felt with them temporarily existing like this, stuck alongside one another in some mockery of patient and nurse, Frank couldn’t be more acutely aware of their diverging paths.

“Yes, ma’am,” he says low, and his voice is too scratchy for it to come across soft. The words hang in the air the rest of the night, ringing in his ears as if mocking the threads of distance he’s clinging to and attempting to preserve so adamantly. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

She doesn’t sleep well that night.

It’s 2AM and he’s got his guns out again, cleaning for the sake of doing something with his hands after the words on the pages start to bleed together in his vision, mind too full of facts and names and the early stages of plans for him to be able to shut his eyes for longer than a second. It’s two hours after she went to bed, retiring at midnight on the dot, but she’s done nothing more than occasionally shifting and letting out deep breaths.

He pretends not to notice, keeping his methodical and slower-than-usual focus on the pieces in his hands. 

Frank tosses the oiled rag to the side when she moves again, rolling on her side, and gets up this time. She pads to the living room lamp that’s closer to her than him and flicks it on. The yellow light makes her squint before she turns back around, but he’s got his eyes on her, notices the stress lines back on her forehead, the way her lips are pulled thin.

It’s not about him. She doesn’t even send a glance his way. Which leaves two options that he’s aware of — Red, or Fisk. He recalls every time he sat on the rooftop across the narrow street, legs perched on the edge, eyes scanning her window and only finding the occasional shadow from the perpetually lit lamp in the corner. 

His gut tells him the latter is the man to blame.

Early morning, she’s sleeping when he turns off the pale kitchen light, but her face is still scrunched and one of her hands is fisted around a corner of the sheet. There’s nothing he can do to help that — help her.

He doesn’t touch the lamp.

 

 

* * *

 

 

There’s a perpetual prickling underneath his skin, the constant shifting sensations of recovery he’s all too familiar with, and with each passing day it becomes harder for him to tune it all out. It gnaws at him without mercy, twisting deeper every time he wakes or lifts his head to find the same walls around him, pinning him in.

He’s restless. 

He always is these days and it’s impossible for him to recall if perhaps a part of him always has been, but right now it’s as if he’s trapped in a cage, some wild animal driven unbalanced. He could leave. Walk right out the door — with or without a note, it doesn’t matter, because Karen will be pissed off about it either way, but it would take him out of her life again, out of her immediate area, and it’s not as if him being here matters a hell of a lot. 

He can’t actively do anything to keep her safe right now.

No, he’s just… _existing_. Existing within her realm like a leech and a reminder of all that haunts her.

Frank snaps the locks on the window back and shimmies up the glass. It takes a minute longer than he’s happy about to fold his legs through so he can step out on the metal grate, and the more injured of the two legs only thrums discontent at him for the effort. It’s hard to tell if he’s genuinely healing fast or if he’s simply getting better at ignoring that by the day.

The air of the city stinks, stale and musty in this alleyway, same as the low rooftops he traverses when he’s not down and out like this. It stinks, but it’s fresher than what’s reminiscent of vanilla candles inside her apartment and it’s more energetic too, activity abuzz and loud out in the streets to each side as they thrum with barely contained chaos.

He walks down the steps to the last landing, grabs hold of the access ladder. It was still down. He’d forgotten to warn her about that and what a safety hazard it was.

With a sigh, he grits his teeth and ignores the pain in his shoulder as he pulls it back up, locking it into place. Another faint splotch of red bleeds through one of his bandages from the exertion.  Yes, he could leave, and damn it did he _want_ to, but he’d still be just as in-disposable somewhere else.

He props the window open after heading back inside. 

It only makes him feel moderately better, but it’s enough.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Every other night, his body steals control from his mind, dragging him into a sleep intense enough that he doesn’t wake again until half the day is over and the small coffee pot Karen’s put on before leaving is long cold. He would almost dread it, almost try fighting it.

Except — he doesn’t dream of them.

He dreams of the _desert_.

It won’t last, violently emotional recollections reemerging in the future when he’ll be least expecting it. He takes it nonetheless. 

Peace is an inherently false achievement, but he’s nothing other than human.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Her files and notes on past reports are spread out in a fan of overlapping subjects across one end of the dining table as he sits, methodically working his way through. It bothers him how much darkness she’s found in some corners of this city that didn’t make it into the final inked version of her stories. He would remember reading about these — everyone would.

More than a couple of times, he finds himself curious about a lead Karen has penned. Curious enough to want to follow it further, investigate for his own methods, returning the balance after all the stories she’s been able to follow from his work. 

Yet, he always stops. 

It’s another one of those lines. 

She could cross into his space and his crime scenes whenever she wanted because it was the right thing. It was a road paved with good intentions and proper righteousness, an attempt to cleanse. Crossing into her space, using her investigations as leads, that would be the opposite. Besides, she was a determined soul; she wouldn’t let go of the bad that easily.

And she hadn’t. 

Notes and statements lie inevitably at the end of each folder — records of telling this or that detective, passing on something anonymous, being asked for a statement as a witness for x, y, and z. All attempts to forward along information that half the time went nowhere. 

A better success rate than most but, nonetheless, it left too many abuses falling through the cracks. 

Frank tears off a notebook page to save the name of one such individual as Karen divides take-out between plates. He grabs hold of the plate as soon as she’s sliding it over, but he doesn’t expect her to linger, hip leaning against the table.

“I’m done with the prisoners,” she says, and he’d been expecting something unpleasant, maybe even an argument from her having enough of him going through her things, but this was not remotely close to predicted. If he was a hoping man, the words that just came out of her mouth would’ve been a _wish_.

Setting down the plate, he lifts his eyes in surprise but doesn’t let it show, blinking at the frustration held taut in her shoulders. 

It becomes easier to notice every time it reappears now that he sees her sometimes without it. Odd intervals of distracted focus, random hours, and blurry moments late at night and early in the morning.

“Good.”

“Whatever Fisk was planning, he’s going to find another way,” she presses. “I know it.”

He knew she would, but there’s no point in trying to do whatever she’s doing here. It feels awfully close to an attempt to work with him, _again_. The last time was the diner and he intended to keep it that way. Frank feigns disinterest with a shrug. “I told you, printing up a story won’t change anything. Only thing that’s going to stop him is me. Now you don’t have to like it, but that’s the truth. This isn’t your fight, ma’am.” 

“Bullshit,” she snaps. His eyes flick over.

A flush hits her cheeks as steel skitters across her gaze, arms starting to cross defensively before realizing her plate’s still in hand. She shifts her hip off the table instead.

He speaks before Karen can turn away. “Sooner or later, you’re going to burn out. How are you going to take care of yourself then? Defend yourself?”

A pained smile curves her lips. “I could say the same thing about _you_.”

It cuts, but she’s not wrong. The difference is that that’s exactly the point of his work, to burn it down and burn out until there’s an undeniable end. She still has a life worth caring about. He could say that, _should_ say that, but that would prompt a discussion he doesn’t want, so he looks to the windows. “Maybe.”

She dips her head. He waits for her to disappear behind him at the desk but she sits down across from him instead. “I never thanked you for the gun.”

It’s a neutral comment, too neutral for him to tell where she’s going with it. “You needed it,” he says simply. “Didn’t want you to go looking for trouble with some shitty dealers.”

She raises her eyebrows. “You think that’s what I would’ve done?” 

“Isn’t it?”

“I don’t know. I got a good piece last time. That’s a one hundred percent success rate.” She’s playing with her food as she speaks, acting as if their conversation could be about something as innocent as the weather, and for a fleeting moment he hears the crooning acoustics of the diner.

He laughs.

“How much was it?”

“Hm?”

“The gun.” Karen takes a bite. He squints, considers scratching curiosity and asking her why.

“Where’d you learn to use ‘em?” He asks instead.

She narrows her eyes at his counter, pursing her lips, and then caves, shoulders falling into relax bit by bit as the minutes pass. “My brother. He learned from our Dad and when I was, I think it was fifteen, he started teaching me. Never thought I’d need to use it. I guess no one does,” she smiles then at her food.

The attempt to hide the sadness doesn’t work, but he lets her think that maybe it is. “You close?” Frank tilts his head, staring at her in the midst of her history-barren apartment. “The two of you?” 

“We _were_.”

Her mouth’s open, hesitating behind a thin fan of hair. 

He could dig, even wants to, but he’s not as good at that as she is — the helping with quiet confessions. Satisfying the selfish and entirely unwarranted desire to know more about her, to finally understand why she ticked the way she did, that would be meaningless if it only left her sitting vulnerable across from him. 

“Two thousand.”

It takes her more than a few seconds to stop spinning her fork. “What?”

“The gun. Took two thousand…. You asked, that’s it. Why?”

She brushes her hair back. Her eyes clear. “So you _don’t_ get a Punisher discount.”

The confusion he doesn’t bother hiding makes her bite her lip in a vain attempt at pushing a smile back. 

“Or I got a woman discount. I don’t know which is worse.”

“You, thinking there’s a Punisher discount.”

“Mm…. You _do_ take out some of their other clients.”

Such a conversation shouldn’t make her smile so quickly again, eyes bright as she leans forward, putting more tease into every new back-and-forth they have until they’ve long since finished eating. Such a conversation shouldn’t make him shake his head, chuckle under his breath, and actually answer the occasional question, too.

But it does.

It’s not normal. 

Maybe normal isn’t possible for either of them.

 

 

* * *

 

 

He wakes slowly, disoriented, the steady pitter-patter of muffled rain threatening to drag him back under with the help of the cocooning sheets until he can differentiate a shower from the drops outside. Muscles more sore from misuse than healing now, he makes himself get up. Off the pills for just over a solid day, his mind is startlingly clear as he goes through the motions of her coffee pot.

A heaviness rests against the back of his neck that he can’t identify. 

Something’s off.

For ten calm minutes, he washes the couple dishes in her sink for her, makes note of the lessening twinges as he stretches, and stares at the steamy wetness pressing against the windows. No opening the windows today, but he doesn't mind all that much. 

He had to start planning for that, though. The _leaving_. 

He’s thought about it every day during the past 13 that he’s been stuck here, but this is the first time he’s had more perspective than the rush to leave, to isolate, to resume his bloody purpose. It’s only right that he does tell her. Discuss it with her.

It’s only right after she’s been so forthright and understanding with him.

The bathroom door opens, so he fetches her a mug, fills it, and hands it over. “Thanks,” she says quiet, and he nods as they stand there against the counter. He wants to bring it up now, tangles and rolls the words around in his head, piecing together how best to do so, when she speaks first. “I dreamt about you.”

He almost has to set his cup down. 

The worry’s clear on her face then, makes him wonder how he missed it just minutes ago as she meets his gaze with quirked lips now. “I don’t know why. But, I _just_ … I thought you should know. It helped me.” 

_It shouldn’t have._

That’s his first thought, what he wants to say, yet it sits lodged against the back of his throat with a hundred other questions that come after it. Questions about why him, why her, why dreams, why now. The pressure at his nape crashes down his spine to the pit of his stomach, leaves him feeling sick, trigger finger tapping against the mug in hand for what he distantly recognizes as the first time in nearly two days. 

Two whole days of… he’s not sure what, afraid to entertain concepts such as peace or comfort. 

She downs the rest of her coffee and retreats, steals out the door, but it’s hard to tell if she really did move fast or if that’s his warped mind tricking him, world spinning around him and rushing through his ears.

 

 

* * *

 

 

He’s gone without a trace. It almost feels too easy.

The only part that makes him pause as he stands on the fire escape is the fact that he’s leaving her latch unlocked, leaving a small crack of exposure into her space that way, and the paranoia itches at him, but it can’t be helped. No one knows about it to attempt trying anything in the handful of hours before she returns. 

He has to believe that’s enough. 

Frank should go far away from her, knows it’s what’s right, what they both need, but he can’t help satisfying the ticking urge two nights later when he comes back to leave an innocuous box of supplies hidden on her rooftop. Just in case.

He resists checking on her that night, but it’s no real accomplishment. 

The sickening weight of guilt-ridden responsibility resting hard against his ribcage controls him more than his own mind.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Four days of stalking is all it takes to confirm that the man he’s following is as corrupt, violent, and repulsive as the small findings in Karen’s files hinted at him being. It’s an easy kill, and he thinks about that for a breath of a second — thinks about how Karen might feel knowing her work lead to one of his crime scenes this time — but he does it anyway. 

The fact that it’s an easy one doesn’t mean it’s _unnecessary_. 

Sore from head to toe, marrow to skin, he stretches out his muscles and clears his head with the hunt. Adrenaline washes a cleansing wave over every sense before he mutters his mantra and pulls the trigger.

He empties more shots into the man’s rapidly-turning-limp body than is really needed, but he uses it as a sign.

The Punisher’s back.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Red shows up faster than he expects. He should’ve kept track of the days better in order to taunt the devil with them, accuse him of keeping tabs where he shouldn’t be. The Punisher’s business is no business of his — and _yet_ , here the devil is.

They spare the knock-down, drag-out fighting theatrics but Frank takes a punch to the jaw and he returns it with a prompt kick to the back of the knee that Red isn’t quick enough to fully dodge.

“Don’t you have better people to stalk around?”

“ _Worse_ , actually,” Red corrects.

He smirks, caught between annoyance and dark humor for half a second as he sets the scope back up. “Go away.”

The devil lingers. “How’d you do it— recover so fast? You were torn apart, Frank.”

“What can I say, maybe your god likes me better.”

That makes him rustle, pestering out of frustration as he tries to suss out Frank’s plans, and he enjoys that uncertainty in the devil even as the idea of a higher being playing favorites over human missions builds a lump of disgust within his stomach.

 

* * *

 

 

The charity storefront of Fisk’s turns into a ghost town by June.

The banker keeps meeting with the lawyer Donovan but despite the fact that he watches them like a hawk, Frank has a distinctly uncomfortable feeling that he’s being left out in the cold about something. Something important.

Fisk isn’t a man to play simple, he’s a man of angles, simultaneously keeping a dozen avenues of opportunities open to him in case one craps out. And one just _did_. 

So what else is up his sleeve?

 

 

* * *

 

 

A ball of fire, the house is splintering at the seams, opening up and collapsing to feed the flames burning inside out that he caused as he rushes to stop it, to save it, but it stretches farther away until it’s only a light in the distance, twinkling at him innocently until suddenly he’s in front of it but the burning home is gone, replaced with a light that’s spinning. Dozens join it until blink by blink the carousel reveals itself, the park strung up as a makeshift beacon in the dark of night.

Maria’s calling out for Lisa, for Frank Jr., and he can’t see her, but panic hits him with the weight of a freight train, flattening him until it’s all he can feel as he runs, searches, _screams_. He can’t abandon them like this, he has to find them, protect them, but all he can see are the blinding bulbs as the wooden horses collapse into ash without a single flame’s touch. 

He jolts alive on the rooftop, head lifting from where it fell against his chest, and it isn’t until he’s paced the length of the narrow building nearly twenty times before he can push the residual trails of white-hot shame away. 

The carnival tune echoes through no matter how much he rolls his shoulders or rubs his head,. For a brief moment, he contemplates hitting himself in a vain attempt to stop it.

He’d been drowning before, been stuck in the dredges of water and blood, but the oppressive darkness of running alone is a new one. It sits with him the rest of the stakeout, and afterwards, through each step and cup of coffee. Sleep becomes stolen restless moments his body mocks him for attempting to control.

Every time, he can’t help remembering the quiet that Karen’s company gave his mind. It only intensifies the wisps of shame and anger that besiege him.

He would rather go back to drowning.

 

 

* * *

 

 

It’s two months to the day after the anniversary, after the day he should’ve done something for them instead of continually out tracking the infinite number of scum that walk the streets. 

He has no excuse.

He stands at the gates of the cemetery with a lone bouquet to offer and almost can’t take a single step forward. Suddenly, he’s nearly a year in the past standing on a different sidewalk and staring at a different archway as grief consumes him, suffocating and unyielding with its weight.

With a clenched jaw and eyes squeezed shut, he snaps himself out of the shadows and steps forward.

It’s not hard to find the graves. The mapped points of their plots within the cemetery’s grid system are burned into his brain even though he only spent a minute attempting to memorize it all. This cemetery wasn’t his choice and neither were the grave stones or the etchings of generic remembrance phrases underneath their dates of existence. 

He wasn’t given the chance. 

Was it some government stooge? Reyes herself? The thoughts makes him squeeze his hands into fists until one of the stems of the flowers breaks under his grip, reminds him to stay calm. For them. For their memory.

The petite vases next to each stone are empty. He distributes the flowers between all three.

The florist sold him on a bunch supposedly associated with funerals. Maria used to take that shit seriously, the symbology, but he can’t begin to know if the florist was actually serious or not, simply did it because anything else felt _wrong_. The only ones he recognizes here are the lilies. 

Lisa liked lilies.

He sits there in silence until dusk sets, lost in memories and regrets until the street lamps kick on nearby and he wipes off the tears he didn’t feel fall before going to find the groundskeeper. He pays for weekly flower refills. They don’t help anything, a worthless empty gesture, but he can at least do this for their final resting place.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

It’s not even the end of the month before he crosses paths with her again. Purely coincidence, the knowledge of that doesn’t make him feel any better about it. 

The knack Karen has for her job extends well beyond any one area of expertise — it’s just something she has and it all too often appears as a way of instinctively thinking too similarly to him. They both latch onto the parole board commissioners as a way to get to Fisk at the same time, forcing him to keep tabs on her again.

It forces him, because every glimpse her way leaves him uncomfortably tense, fight or flight kicking in, reading to protect her or turn away from her reach if the situations arise. But they don’t, not right now. 

He watches her work through the windows of The Bulletin as if nothing’s changed, staying one step behind him as she operate more in the legal framework of society than he does, and all the while he tries to come up with a way to tell her to leave it alone. 

His mind fails him with silence. 

Nothing would work, anyway.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Rose calls on a storming day after he clears out a lowly gang’s new shipment of cocaine with a couple grenades and a careful tip-off to the Fire Department.

“I got a hit off your Micro search.”

He straightens his back against the alley’s wall. “What kind of hit?” 

“It’s some reply in code. ‘ _Where is Goliath buried?’”_

It always was a stupid reference, but the confirmation flares his zeal.

Finally he’s getting somewhere.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Maria’s got a dozen paint splotches up on the walls and it’s a chaotic mess of colors, brights and pastels, neutrals and otherwise, and he was supposed to surprise her with his leave time but she just turns and surprises him with the project she’s started, laughing all the while as he picks her up and calls her a mad woman for painting pregnant. She’s protesting against the dropped brush, the stain in the carpet, but he just asks after the colors, turns in a circle to assess them all, gets stuck with feet to the floor as the colors jump and spin around him until he’s standing watching the carousel moving round and round.

Lisa and Frank Jr. scream at once, high and loud and raw, and he turns to find them, sun blinding his eyes for a disorienting minute until he finds himself woken by a white beam of light coming from a crack in the blinds. 

Frank can’t stand fast enough, pulling on his boots and grabbing a go-bag as the claustrophobic room attempts to press him as flat as his lungs feel.

 

 

* * *

 

 

He’s halfway through setting up on the adjacent rooftop to watch Karen charm her way through a ridiculously overpriced charity gala hosted by some of the less suspicious figures within the Department of Corrections when he notices it. 

 Her shadow.

The plan _was_ to watch until she left, make note of which cars belong to which commissioners, and use some of his contacts to track them as he widens the net around Fisk’s possible associates. It swiftly changes to him flanking around to the other side of the street, stalking through the darkness until he can wrap a crushing arm around the man’s windpipe with a knee jab to the kidney while raising his pistol at the driver of the van.

“Out.” 

The driver complies with an jittery scowl. 

The man in his grip attempts to go for the knife at his side, so Frank spares a short second to knock him over the head with the butt of the gun. It dazes him enough to make him stop as he fights to maintain consciousness instead.

“How much this time?” Words coated in ice, he has a better grip on his emotions than the last time he ran down one of Karen’s shadows. The anger’s still ebbing high and red threatens the edges of his vision, but reminders of his mistakes last time keep him grounded firm on his feet, fingers wrapped on the handle instead of knuckles pressed to skin.

The other man’s scowl gives way to fear. “No, it’s not that— we’re not here for _you_ , we’d _never_ —”

“The blonde journalist.” Thing 1 and Thing 2 share a look that confirms away any doubts he might have had. “How much?”

The one in his arm attempts to twist out of grip at the same time the driver lunges back for the van. Thing 2 gets a hand on the knife this time a moment before Frank fires a round through his temple and drops the dead weight onto the asphalt.  

The driver spins back clumsily with hands in the air. “Twenty K, alright, _fuck_ , some ghost put out a no conditions contract! _Please_ , just—”

Blood sprays across the side of the van as he falls alongside his friend before Frank is stepping over the body and sliding into the still-warm seat to take their camera and any other electronics with him. This is the shit he needs Micro for, needs Micro to tell him which of this garbage he can get anything off of, but for now he’s not leaving anything behind.

He can’t take the risk of Karen’s name being found anywhere near this.

 

 

* * *

 

 

An hour later and she's got one hand holding her keys and the other in her purse as she walks down her hallway. No doubt that hidden hand is ready to pull her tucked away .380. Seeing that sends some relief trickling along his spine, even as she jumps when he calls out “Ma’am.” 

He expects questions, prodding, maybe some anger at the lack of communication. She’s entitled to those feelings and more. 

All she does is stare, raking her gaze meticulously across his frame like she’s cataloguing all the changes from the last time she saw him, and it’s actually difficult to resist the urge to shift away, or worse — to look at her the same way.

After a minute, she turns her back. “Hungry?” 

She gets the door open and doesn’t wait for a response as she enters.  

Frank takes a beat before following. 

“You like pizza?”

“Hell no,” he denies immediately.

“The Punisher doesn’t like _pizza_. I should pitch that to my boss.” She lifts her head to consider more of the mostly-empty shelf space within the fridge, lifts it enough for him to see the hint of a laugh on her face. 

It’s the first time he’s actually been _welcomed_ into her space without barging in and he’s more than a little struck by how indifferently she’s treating it. Treating him. He’s welcomed, and yet he still feels as if he’s an intruder, the blood-soaked standing on a floor of white marble.

He clears his throat. “Yeah, I bet he’d be curious about your source,” Frank manages to respond, moving towards the windows. The restless roll underneath his nerves ebbs away slightly at the empty street-view.

They take different cuisines and trade the occasional pointless small-talk as a cord of tension sits between them, waiting for one of them to address it first, but Frank keeps his throat quiet as she devours her terrible pizza. It’s a stark contrast to the tacos he barely touches, hunger nowhere to be found right now. 

It hasn’t been a reliably present urge for him since the bullet that tore through his skull.

She notices this — he knows she does, can see it in the flicker of her eyes as they keep skittering towards him and his idle hands, the balanced plate fast growing cold — but she doesn’t say anything. It’s troubling her, though, and that only quiets him further. 

Karen’s coffee pot beeps and he’s got a mug in hand to fill before he realizes knowing which cabinet they reside in was an automatic reach.

“Why are you here?”

The cracked closet door clangs as she kicks her heels off in front of it. He lets the coffee burn his throat before responding. “You looked good at that party with, uh, your lawyer friend, and that other woman.”

It makes him sound particularly awful, put that way, and she raises her brows when he turns around, but he doesn’t have any idea how to fix the way the truth sounds so he doesn’t try. “You were watching?” He nods and her brows lower. “Who were you _really_ there for?”

She doesn’t beat around the bush. He almost wishes she would, almost doesn’t want to have this talk at all. Red was the messenger with the last hit put out on her, saved Frank the trouble on that one, but she needs to know.

One contract should’ve been all she would ever have to deal with. 

One was already too many.

Frank rips the ball cap off his head and tosses it to the counter, pushing his rapidly growing hair back, caught between feeling too exposed and as if he’s hiding like a child in front of her. They’re false sensations considering how much she’s always been able to read him, but he can’t stop moving. 

He takes his time filling a mug for her before moving to the windows, watching the street again. “You’re still working Fisk.”

“Why are you _here_ , Frank?” She asks, voice tired. He meets her eyes.

“Your name. It’s out there.” She swallows light, but he catches it. His finger starts tapping against his thigh. “Some incompetent street thugs got an offer of twenty thousand for your head, and they were going to try tonight.”

“How— how did you find out?”

 _By accident_ , he should say, or by chance, by coincidence, by a sheer stroke of fucking _luck_. Every one of those was true. 

It was situations like this that reminded him how tenuously life hung in the balance for everyone and not just the criminals he put down. He couldn’t watch her every second of every day and yet the urge was there, warring against the one screaming at him to leave her be and never see her again, but he couldn’t fully blame himself for this time, either.

She was more than capable of sussing out her own trouble.

He looks away regardless. “I said ‘ _were_ ’, didn’t I?”

“You killed them.” 

It’s not a question, but he can’t help responding. “Yes.”

Her cup echoes loud from where it’s set on the table. “Well, I’m glad I didn’t have to run home in my heels this time.”

“Don’t do that,” he mutters under his breath, turning to face her completely with too much frustration to hide, terror mixed within it that he can’t help butchering with something akin to anger. “Christ, you’re going to get yourself _killed_. Is that what you want?”

She folds her arms and bows up, stepping close. “I can take care of myself — I’m _not_ a porcelain doll.”

“ _I know_ — I know you’re not,” he says hard and quick, resists adding a ‘ _but_ ’ at the end of it. She’s not a doll by any means, she’s just like the goddamn pit bull he accused her of being before, tenacious and vicious and with more ability to tear him apart than even Red has with that damned billy club, more than capable of tearing about every scumbag she writes about.

But all the strength in the world doesn’t account for the instances of life that boil down to luck.

It was good to him today. He couldn’t pretend it would always be that way. 

Not for either of them.

He could try to say all that, but he’s got a strong instinct right now telling him she wouldn’t let him finish without making it an argument, a _loud_ one, and considering that makes him acutely aware of the foot of distance between them, how hard he’s been breathing as he worked through his own thoughts and how she’s looking at him with something all too foreign.

A car honks down at the street and her eyes drop to his lips.

Not something foreign, no — something all too familiar.

Frank steps away fast but their arms lightly brush and it leaves him with the phantom sensation of being burned. He grabs for his ball cap and has it pulled low by the time she’s calling for him to wait. White grip on the doorknob, he knows he should leave. He has to. 

He isn’t whoever or whatever the hell she thinks he is, can’t be that with her. _For_ her.

And yet, he pauses.

“Thank you,” she says, and his eyelids squeeze tight. An unreleased shudder of pain tears through him. “I still don’t like what you do, but. I understand it. And I _appreciate_ it. Not just for me, but for the city, everyone else. There is a place for what you do… and accepting _help_ wouldn’t be the end of the world.” 

Resisting the urge to look back is futile as it takes hold of him until he’s trapped staring at her blues that tell a story of more abuse and grief than she deserves. His throat is raw sandpaper. “You offering to help, ma’am?”

Karen straightens. “Yeah. I am.”

“You sure about that?” He asks, incredulous, but she doesn’t give an inch. “You help me, you’ll only get blood on your hands.”

“I already have blood on my hands.”

She almost had his on hers half a year ago by force of a bullet. 

He put his blood on her hands just a month ago by force of a plea.

“Doesn’t mean you need any _more_ ,” is all he says before opening the door.

She may be offering, may think it’s nothing after the short pain he’s seen her endure and the past he’s sure exists far beyond him, but it’s another one of those nearly invisible lines that can’t be uncrossed, that chips away at one’s mind and soul without realization, and he can’t let her walk into that.

He won’t accept it.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Red waits exactly a day. 

“You following me?” He asks as soon as he senses the extra presence.

The devil steps out of the shadows and closer to where Frank sits in the back of his latest pickup truck acquisition on top of an empty parking garage, loading up backup magazines bullet by bullet. “It wasn’t Fisk this time so who was it?” 

“You really got a knack for interrogation, you know that, Red?” 

He frowns tight. “Who’s after her?”

Frank tosses a full clip to the side and starts on a new one, head down. “I don’t know. But I’m handling it. Why don’t you go find them?”

“ _Handling_ it? By, what, following her again?”

“Don’t get all high and mighty with that bullshit on me, I know you’ve done the same goddamn thing—”

“It’s not the same—”

“It’s exactly the same!”

“I don’t kill people, Frank!”

Frank throws the clip down and resists the urge to stand up, shaking his head and gesturing wildly. “I’ve got no control over what danger Karen jumps in but I can tell every piece of shit out on these streets that The Punisher’s coming for their heads if they look her way, and that threat works a hell of a lot better than your _jail_ _rotation_ bullshit!”

Red falters. “What did you do?”

He takes a deep breath and shakes his head, steadies his hands. “I didn’t name Karen, I put out a warning. Journalists, cops, prosecutors. They won’t touch her.”

“You can’t be sure of that.”

No, he can’t, but he has to pretend or else he’s going to lose what’s left of his mind. 

Frank presses his lips tight and picks up the clip he threw before. 

“She’s looking into the parole commissioners. She’s gonna find something,” he says matter-of-factly. His instincts are more accurate than not, and her gut’s one of the best at reading people. If they’re both lured in then there’s something there.

The devil huffs at the topic change, but follows it cautiously. “Why’re you telling me?”

“…She might need help.”

Red ticks his head to the side and Frank waits for him to ask what he’s dying to, waits for the second round of the debate about laws and due process that Frank has just contradicted himself on with this one pass of information.

He waits, but the questions don’t come.

They both already know the answer, anyway.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Lisa’s dancing and skipping in place, tugging at Maria’s arm and pleading his way with her giant smile for another ride, just one more, when a shriek tears through the air and red sprays as they fall. He’s hit but he doesn’t know where, doesn’t matter when it means one second he’s running and the next he’s facedown, clawing at the dirt catching grass between his fingers, but when he looks up everything stays dark, only shadows moving in distorted lumps amongst each other as the screams sound off with the power of bombs around him.

He can’t see, can’t feel, barely able to pull himself along to reach any of them — but he can’t protect them. He’s already failed at that as the taste of copper starts to tinge his tongue and numbness seeps through his bones, starts to paralyze him—

Frank’s stuck in a cold sweat, limbs sluggish as he tries to sit up from where’s slumped on his side. Operating for nearly 48 hours with only one short nap means he isn’t surprised that exhaustion violently shoved him out of consciousness, but this dream was _why_ he’d only had one nap. 

Foolishly, he’d attempted to wait it out.

They were starting again, creeping their way back into the forefronts of his mind nearly every time he shut his eyes. This dream though leaves him panicked, pressing cool hands against forehead. 

A nightmare born from a memory, he’s starting to have trouble piecing together which details are real and which ones are warped, tries to remember if Lisa really had been holding onto Maria or was she latched onto him, if Frank Jr. was sprinting ahead to the carousel or behind him on the blanket? Had he been able to move after the shots struck him or were the dreams where he crawled fake? Had he been knocked out or had he seen the carnage?

The question swim within his head until he risks closing his eyes and taking a deep breath, fingers slowly stilling from their erratic tempo against his skull as he parsed through the chaos in his mind and puts the fragile certainties he had of that day back together. It was never complete though, but it was stay together for now. Until the next dream.

And then it would fall apart all over again, like Humpty Dumpty on the wall.

There’s a flash of a vision of Frank Jr. asking him to read that story, over and over, and it’s bedtime but he swears he’ll fall asleep to it this time, _daddy just has to do the voice_ —

He’s being strangled by his own lungs as he pushes off the ground, sucks in a deep breath. “One batch, two batch, penny and dime,” he repeats under his breath over and over, taking the rifle resting against the ledge back in shaky hands as he collapses it. 

By the time he’s got it tucked away in the bulky backpack and climbs down the fire escape, Frank is tapping his trigger finger to a steady beat and turns north towards another gang in the area, stakeout he’d been on now moot and missed. 

He keeps the mantra rolling in his head.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Frank tracks a dog-fighting ring out of Manhattan and up to the Bronx.

It consumes him, following the lead of group after group of so-called trainers. A tame word for animal abusers. He welcomes how the savage fury takes him over for a week, welcomes the satisfying distraction from Fisk and the rest of Manhattan. 

Giving Red the heads-up about the Fisk lead he had kept him away from Karen, kept him out of her orbit — or at least he thought it did until he realized nearly every other lead he had on crime throughout the city right now tied back to Karen and the files of hers he’d worked through with the focus of an honors student.

Karen and her offer, her look, her _understanding_.

It unsettles something deep within his bones, throws him off balance and drives his paranoia too high. There’s a responsibility there that she’s giving him — or maybe he took it long ago, only feeling the effects just now when it’s too late to return, too late to abandon and forget — and it terrifies him too much to acknowledge, let alone unbox.

He’s wanted to decipher her since she back-talked him in the hospital, wanted to discover all her pieces so he could put her together like a puzzle and figure her fascinating mind out, but he’s not so sure anymore. Every new discovery makes it harder for him to step back, stay out of her life.

So, he turns away.

The dog fight is organized in a crumbling and abandoned apartment complex in the Bronx. He finds the dogs in cages down a back hallway in an otherwise empty living space, makes sure they’re locked up away and safe before pulling his AR-15 off his back.

He catches the first few by surprise in the halls, shooting out shoulders or kneecaps before delivering the killing bullet simply because they’ve enraged him so badly. He can spare these shots. The last one comes out of nowhere, hidden around the corner after hearing the shots, but they barely get half an inch of a blade in his arm before he’s snapping their neck and then he kicks out the door leading to the inner courtyard packed side-to-side with spectators that came with wads of cash to bet. 

One glimpse of the skull on his chest has them starting a stampede.

It passes in a violent blur as he focuses on those he recognizes, focuses on the abusers running the business and running the dogs. Sirens wail not long after the real chaos begins in the center of the complex and Frank should go, knows he should leave after he presses his boot into one last face, but he only keeps a mental note on the rapidly decreasing distance of the sirens as he heads back to the cages, wiping a streak of blood off his cheek. 

They start making noise as soon as he walks through the doorway.

Most of these dogs are too hardened to be saved. Knowing that crashes him off the heady adrenaline high as he looks at them, watches them barking and fighting and clawing through the cage sides at him and at each other. The damage is already done beyond repair and it only leaves him with a heart as heavy as lead.

He keeps looking, though, back and forth over the cages, until he spies three. They’re young, barely pups, and only lash out occasionally in defense. 

In _fear_. 

They’ll be grouped in with the rest when the police arrive, but they shouldn’t be.

Frank opens the cage door of the smallest one, coaxes it out. It trembles in his touch. He holds it gently within his jacket and leashes the other two. They nip at him, catch his pants as they’re caught between going after each other or ganging up on him, but he muzzles them fast and leads them out as the cops kick down the first door.

 

 

* * *

 

 

It’s past midnight when he returns to the heart of Manhattan and pulls up to a pit bull rescue charity open all hours that he’d been sure to find beforehand. 

When he’d been Frank Castle, really been the man instead of a ghost in a shell, he would’ve been talking this through with Maria. He would’ve been trying to convince her they could keep them, he could help them, they could at least take in the youngest and give it love, adopt that one properly. 

But if he was still that man, he wouldn’t have them like this right now. He’d have Lisa and Frank Jr. at his side as they walked down a kennel hallway only being told which pups came from tragic pasts, a story they only hear but don’t see a second of.

He changes to a plain shirt and wipes the last of the blood splatters off his neck and arms before walking them in. The tired woman behind the counter gives him a look-over more than once, the gaze of someone that’s talking themselves out of finding someone familiar, but quickly calls someone from the back to help take the dogs. 

She tries to get him to fill out a report, but since he can’t share where he rescued the dogs without linking them to it as well, he lies about finding them wandering. He moves to leaves but she starts to speak again.

“Are you with the _police_ , or…” 

“No. Anonymous bystander,” he corrects flatly, turning back slightly.

She smiles apologetically. “Sorry, you look like a cop or soldier or something. We take in a lot of rescues from them from crime scenes, poor things.”

Frank stills. 

Her brows furrow. “You okay?”

“…Do you have a list I can look at?”

 

 

* * *

 

 

He sees her story on the front-page of the paper.

It doesn’t have her name attached to it, but he knows it’s Karen’s work when he reads about one Commissioner Rhodes arrested for corruption, underage prostitution, and more. Too much more.

It strikes him that they both took their hands off so the legal system could work first. They have to stop doing that — synchronizing this way. It’s eerie and he hates it, hates most that they do it out of the purest of coincidences. He’d made his choice to let her work uninhibited by the polarizing effect that follows his moniker but she’d done it…why?

A swirl of satisfaction slides along his nerves after a minute when he considers how this is another avenue for Fisk’s power expansion closed but this time without any familiar names tied to it. The look of displeasure on that man’s face right about now was something he could be tempted to see again.

One of the burner phones buzzes from his jacket’s pocket and he throws the paper away before answering. 

“Hope you didn’t mind, but I had to be careful.”

Frank blinks, caught between surprise and a short temper. “ _Micro_.”

“I thought you died, man. _Multiple_ times.”

“And I thought you quit breaking laws,” he counters. “Let’s meet.”

Micro sighs. “You know how risky that is? I got a new life now — I mean it. I only do this shit on the side, sometimes.”

He was getting better at lying, slightly, but it was still all too clear and made Frank clench his jaw before speaking with deceptive calm. “Hear me out, and you get the disc back.”

Silence pings from the other end of the line. Frank knows he’s going to cave, knows he has the trump card in this equation, he just has to wait for the man to talk himself into it. 

Putting the phone to his chest for a moment, he whistles loud. Max comes running.

The little patience he had wears thin. 

“Micro. You _owe_ me.”

The other man groans. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

She’s not at The Bulletin.

It’s broad daylight on a Thursday and the last place he expects to find her is leaving a Spanish restaurant two short blocks from her apartment, but maybe that’s a good thing. She’s not holing up at work, she’s actually living more decently as a normal person today, and a slight dampness of guilt presses against his neck at the small sacrifice of a favor he’s about to ask her for.

He likes to think he would ask anyone else if he _had_ anyone else, but that proves hard to imagine. The trust he places in her has warped into its own unique entity at this point far beyond the reaches of anyone else.

Coming up beside her, he almost wants to wait to see if she’ll pull that gun out of her purse that she’s reaching for. “Ma’am.”

She removes her hand and Max tries to sniff it lazily but Frank pulls him to the other side. “I didn’t think you got out in the sunlight,” she remarks without missing a step.

Lips curving slight, briefly, he swallows it back. “Can I ask you for a favor? You don’t have to say yes, if you don’t want to.”

If it were anyone else, he’d expect the fear to rise up, but Karen just looks at him curiously. “Okay, what is it?”

He nods downward before scanning the street. “Max needs someone to watch him for a couple days.”

 She smiles at the pit bull for a moment. “When did you get him?”

 “That’s a long story,” he says and catches her stare at that as she waits, poised to listen. 

He’s torn between sharing the full truth, talking too much, and not saying anything at all, just testing how long she’ll look at him like this. The last is a thought he particularly shouldn’t have, one that spreads shame across his skin and makes him look away as he licks his lips. 

“I lost track of him for a while,” he shares. “Short version, I’ve had him two weeks.”

“Where will you be?”

“Here and there.” 

She stops in front of the steps of her building and he gives Max enough leash to smell the tree growing between concrete squares near her. Karen rebalances the bag of takeout in her hands as she removes her keys from her purse and then reaches for the leash. 

 A silent assent.

Frank passes it, hand over hers and holding her fingers for a second longer than necessary, caught by the soft warmth before pulling away. She gives him that look again and he feels betrayed by himself, torn between knowing it was an accidental touch and knowing it was done entirely on purpose. Maybe even to see if she’d give him this gaze again. 

He manages to hate himself in a new way.

“Be careful.” He nods, but she presses. “ _Please_.”

There’s no attempt there for a promise to stay alive and he wonders if that was on purpose. “You have my word, ma’am,” he says, voice tipped low.

Her eyes flutter.

He should thank her, but he doesn’t quite trust his voice right now, or his brain for that matter with the way it’s stringing his muscles taut, fight or flight alighting within him. Except that it’s not fight — it’s something more crippling that he can’t give name to.

With a blink, he sees someone coming down the street in his periphery and turns to the side, cap dipping lower over his eyes as he watches them pass before stepping away from her. Max looks up at him and he pats the dogs head before tipping the ball cap at Karen and walking away, avoiding meeting her gaze again.

Looking back at the end of the block before he has to turn the corner, Frank watches her unlock the door and lead a docile Max inside. 

He knew that dog had good instincts.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The address Micro shared leads him to an artsy coffee shop across the river in Queens, and the crowd of clientele makes him more annoyingly uncomfortable than he’s been in months. He kicks one of the legs of Micro’s chair when he comes up behind him at a corner table before sliding into a seat across. 

“ _Jeez_ ,” Micro mutters, playing up his leg injury before catching Frank’s dead eyes. He smirks. “You couldn’t do more to look out of place.”

“I am out of place. Why here?”

“I couldn’t give my home address over the phone. Everyone’s listening.”

“You mean anyone,” Frank attempts to correct, but Micro shakes his head.

 “ _Everyone_.” Two sides of the same coin regarding paranoia — they’d always had that in common, at least. Micro leans his elbows on the table. “I saw about Schoonover’s disappearance. Your doing?”

“He was running heroin.”

It’s not a yes, but Micro squints at him with a knowing smile. “Good. Hated that asshole anyway.”

Frank recalls the trust he’d put in his old CO, how many years he followed orders, how two-faced Schoonover revealed himself to be when he spat bullshit in front of Frank’s face as he had the gall to justify killing an innocent family. _His_ innocent family. He squeezes his hands into fists where he has his arms crossed, angry at the surge of guilt from his former ignorance.

“I’m sorry,” Micro says, cutting through Frank’s thoughts, and he looks up to find the other man’s face uncharacteristically somber. “About your family. I’m sorry.”

He turns his head away to scan the place after a short nod. “I know you’re not too far out of the business, Micro. Don’t lie.”

“I do side jobs,” he sighs. “Grease the money wheels, keep the skills from turning rusty. That’s it.”

“So do side jobs for me. With me.”

Micro stares closely. “Which one?”

“Depends how much you want to be involved,” Frank says neutrally, giving the other man a choice even though the answer’s all but certain. Micro hadn’t changed one bit. 

He grins slow. “Come on, I’ll show you my setup.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

Frank gives Micro a rundown of everything he needs to know and keeps it simple, for now.  

“You’ve been busy,” Micro says once, more to himself than to Frank as his fingers fly away across the keyboard.

“No point sitting around.” Never mind that that’s _impossible_ for him to do. He’d go mad before he could sit still.

They pin their focus on Fisk and start digging.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Five days after he left Max in her care, Frank take a duffel of gear to her rooftop before knocking on her door. His intention had been to be gone three days at most, using the trip for meeting with Micro properly to also keep chasing down some interconnected Russian gangs that were partially responsible for the dog fighting ring. Getting to all of them ended up taking more time and force than expected, a sore rib and some other bruises earned from the effort. 

There’s an apology on his lips that dies when Karen opens the door. 

Bloodshot eyes and sunken cheeks that look suspiciously tear-stained, he softly locks the door behind for her as she moves away almost catatonically. “What’s wrong?” He asks carefully, watching her set the gun down on her desk. 

Was she just being careful or had something happened to trigger having that so readily available?

The idea of someone laying a hand on her has his insides burning but he keeps still except for the tapping of his trigger finger. He can’t explode on someone. Not yet.

She pulls a bag of dog food from one of the kitchen cabinets and maybe he startles her with the way he followed her into the kitchen but the fog behind her eyes clears a touch when she blinks. 

“What happened?” He attempts again.

“I didn’t know what you fed him, but the saleswoman talked me into this apparently _crazy_ healthy one. It was expensive as hell so you might as well take it with you,” she spiels fast, deflecting as she keeps staring at his chest.

Frank takes the bag, setting it on the countertop behind him as she wraps her arms around herself.

She’s terrifying him and he doubts she knows that, realizes it, stuck in her head as she is, and that only compounds how _wrong_ something must be for her to be this drawn within herself. Max whines lightly from where he’s sitting by the couch.

Tears spill out of her then, suddenly, and hopeless dread sinks a pit within him. He’s tried to be careful, has been careful, but he can’t regret giving into instinct as he reaches out to cup her face, focus her. She finally meets his gaze and he’d be relieved if her blues weren’t swimming with despair. “What’s wrong?” He tips his voice to a whisper and he catches how her lip quivers. “ _Karen_?”

Fresh tears shimmer down and he wipes them quickly away with his thumbs as she confesses, “ _My brother died today_ …. Not _today_ — several years ago.” Gripping his wrists then, her nails cut against his veins, but he barely feels their bite. “I almost _forgot_. This is the first year I’ve done that,” she chokes out softly and suddenly he can’t breathe either. “How could I ever forget?”

He steps closer to hold her more steady as she wavers and shudders, telling him about the car crash, about her loss, regret, grief. Understanding clicks into place as she struggles to bat the memories away, as she blames herself, and it cuts at him hard and fast until he can’t take it, can’t watch her destroy herself like this. 

Like he did more deservedly to himself.

She struggles, but he shushes soft until she’s squeezing his wrists with white knuckles. “That _wasn’t_ your fault,” he rasps. “Not for one goddamn second. _You hear me_?”

“It doesn’t _feel_ that way. I was there, and _I didn’t do anything_. I just watched him die.”

She hiccups and looks at him then with the fear he’s always waited for, always expected and never received from her, but it’s not fear of hurt, of a monster. It’s fear of _rejection_. Frank’s eyes flutter as his chest splits open and the part of him that would normally be protesting is silent as he pulls her close by the shoulders, wrapping her tight in his arms as she buries her head and sobs into his shoulder.

Lost and bereft, he cradles her head and blinks away his own tears as her grief pulls out some of his, too.

 

 

* * *

 

 

There’s a bottle of scotch open on the kitchen counter that he’d spied before, been able to smell on her breath. He reseals it and tucks it away before putting a pot of coffee on. 

She’s drained and yet wide-awake where she sits on the couch, Max tucked against her side in comfort, and he understands that feeling all too well as he silently brings her a cup of coffee.

An urge flairs to tuck a stray strand of hair behind her ear. He ignores it, mind clearer than before, and moves to watch out the window instead, leaning against the wall.

He waits for her to fall asleep but she doesn’t, staring blank at the television on low that’s running a montage of old sitcoms. Half an hour rolls by, and then another. Frank looks at the time and thinks of his duffel on the roof.  

He makes another pot of coffee.

 

 

* * *

 

 

A sort of resignation sits between his ribcage, trapped within his lungs, a sensation devoid of anything positive or negative. It’s just a fact. 

The clock ticks after 3AM and he watches her get up out of the corner of his eye. He’s fetched the duffel from the roof and brought it back, spread across her dining table now as he rhythmically goes through the process of cleaning them. She fills her cup, moving with more determination now than she has all night, and when she walks past he wonders if she’s going to lay down, but she simply sits in the other chair. 

She’s tense as she watches his hands. 

“I’ve killed before,” she says suddenly, cutting through the near-silence after several long minutes.

She’s all wound up, same as before, curled into herself as if she’s readying herself for judgment, and confessing like she’s sitting in a Catholic Church about to get a lecture on how much she’s sinned and needs to repent. 

The behavior of one that doesn’t confess all that much to anyone.

It claws at him then — the wonder at their connection or understanding or whatever the hell it was that they’d both sensed right away, that kept them coming back to one another despite all the reasons _not_ to. It makes him want to know if she’s ever confessed these things to someone else or if it’s for him and him alone, but there’s an answer to that he can already sense, that weighs on him in a way that’s bothering him from the way it doesn’t actually burden him at all.

Karen’s reached out, so he opens his mouth. “You trying to surprise me?”

“…I don’t mean self-defense like a couple months ago at the apartments on 47th, or— or what you _guessed_ , in the diner.”

He watches her fingers curl around the cup in her grip as his own hands keep moving without missing a beat, picking up a cloth to oil with. “There wasn’t much guessing there. People, they have a way of carrying themselves different after a death. You just shoot someone, there’s a tell for that too, but when they _die_ … You were too sure on your feet when you pulled that gun on me,” he shares.

“That doesn’t bother you? Knowing I’ve… done that?”

Frank thinks of Red’s morality, the morality of anyone blessed with the ability to survive a fight without it resorting to the survival of one life or the other. “It haunts you,” he says simply and switches to loading a magazine. “If it didn’t, then maybe it would, but no…. _No_ , it doesn’t bother me.”

“So you’re not going to even ask?”

Vaguely, he wonders if this is a test, but Karen’s not that kind of person. Not with this. He looks at her grip, the way her shoulders are dipped inward, the hair falling in her face as her teeth worry her lip. Frank sets the bullets down and folds his hand, trigger finger idly tapping to its own slow beat as he looks her in the eye. “I’m listening.”

She sighs short, a sort of release, and entrusts him with her darkest memories.

 

 

* * *

 

 

For all her story of hunting down her brother’s murderer is one of revenge, he knows he can’t give her the sense of camaraderie she’s searching so desperately for. She was devastated, once, acted recklessly from it, and it guides her to be better — to live and try again. She leads positive change whereas he just snuffs out the darkest flames, and she wants to believe it’s the same, that it _can_ be, but he won’t convince her of a lie she already knows is false. 

He stretches his hand across the table and rests it gently on her forearm. “Ma’am, it’s not the same. What you _did_ and what I _do_. What you did and what the assholes I kill do.”

A shock goes through him when she puts her hand over his and he can’t help squeezing her arm, a poor substitute for comfort as he struggles for words while she stares down where they touch. “ _You’re a good person_ ,” he affirms. “Been in some shitty situations, no argument there, but you’re good. Trust me.” 

“I do,” she whispers and it seizes him like a promise. Her eyes are honest and clear when she looks up. “I wish you trusted _me_ , too.”

She needs to know that he does, that he _is_ , but Frank looks between her eyes, reads what’s unspoken there, and the words sit as a lump at the back of his throat. In one swift movement, she’s turned it around on him. She shouldn’t.

Yet he can’t find it within himself to tell her to stop, either.

Gaze dropping, he pulls his hand back and pretends he doesn’t miss the warmth of her touch as he picks up cool metal once more.

 

 

* * *

 

 

He’s purposeful when he leaves a different duffel bag with civilian clothes on her rooftop the next night before knocking on her door, scratching the itch that tells him to check on her because she’ll put a face up for everyone but everyone else doesn’t know the truth. Not the way he does.

She’s helped him far more than he can ever return the effort, helped him sort through the jumbled matter that is his mind, let him trust her with every fear and confession he’s been willing to say aloud long before he realized that’s what he was doing — _trusting_.

The least he can do is return that.

The fact that he’s had a steady stream of worry drip its way through his veins since he left yesterday is just one more bit of incentive to see her open the door again.

The circles under her eyes are only half as dark and her desk is thoroughly wrecked once more but she manages to make the messy bun and random pen marks on her cheek look healthier. Professional, even. 

He makes a pot of coffee unprompted and has the urge to ask about her latest project.

This time, he does.

She's eager to share.

 

* * *

 

 

He stops by the next night with Max. Frank takes the dog food back with him.

“Favor?” She asks as soon as she spies it.

“Two days.”

She takes it with a soft smile while Max bumps against her legs for a pet.

 

* * *

 

 

Micro gives him a tip-off on a corrections officer as he digs through every hidden electronic record tied to Fisk that he can get his digital fingers on. The man receives heavy payments every month, the highest connection Fisk has within the prison’s non-criminal populace, and Frank enjoys interrogating him for the hour it lasts before Red shows up.

The fight that follows leaves him with a black eye and several nasty cuts just on his face, but he put a dent in the devil’s armor again — albeit the chest-plate, not the helmet — and can keep the rage in check by knowing that the bastard excuse of an officer was getting arrested before he was going back to being a useful pawn in Fisk’s pocket. 

He looks like shit, even after he cleans himself up, but he stops by Karen’s anyway.

After all, he promised that he would.

He was doing that more often — the _promising_ — and it was a terrible habit, a terrible practice in general, but it injects an addictive sense of predictability into his routine that has nothing to do with going to same place more than once and everything to do with the late-night discussions they have nearly three times a week now.

Frank is barely in the door when she’s got her hand on his face and he can’t help leaning into it for a breath of a second before gently pulling her hand down with his own. “Ma’am, it’s fine.”

“You’re going to lose your eyes one day,” she bites, words dripping with too much concern to be harsh. She turns towards the bathroom then. “I’m grabbing the kit.”

He could tell her that he’s already patched himself up and changed out of his bloody clothes on the roof, but then that wouldn’t give her this cathartic outlet, so he just makes a fresh pot of coffee and obliges with keeping the bandaid under his eye while he’s here.

 

 

* * *

 

 

She called him a dead man and he’d latched onto the moniker easily, but it’s a slow slide out before he blinks and realizes that it doesn’t fit any part of him anymore.

And maybe more of him than not no longer wants it to.

He’s not alive though, either, stuck in this limbo where he regrets nothing as The Punisher and yet keeps showing back up at Karen’s door. It’s beyond wrong, beyond fucked up to live this way, if this is even a _way of living_ at all, but Karen reaches for him, shines brighter than she had all the months he kept trying to ignore her, and it’s selfish to take that as an incentive but he does anyway.

He does, because she’s bared her soul to him, crawled behind nearly all of his walls and sat there as a rightful friend, and even if it’s far beyond something as simple as friendship, he can’t stop.

A need exists between them, a tether, and if it were just him then he’d walk away same as before, make the same choice as before — but it’s not.

So, he keeps coming back.

 

* * *

 

 

 

Red leaves the city to take down a gun-for-hire ring Fisk puts on the governor.

He doesn’t tell Frank, but Micro is able to trace the funds from the now in-name-only charity his lawyer had been a part of. There isn’t much he can do with that information himself but in-between tracking lone criminals from the police radio and following what appears to be a new resourceful immigrant gang popping up near Central Park, Frank passes it to Karen. 

He pretends it doesn’t mean much of anything. It’s not a recognition of her offer to help him as he works as The Punisher, not by any means, but he decides he can keep that wall up all the while helping her. 

It’s not information he has use for, but it’s right up her alley.

She thanks him and lingers with more small-talk than legitimate questions as he stands on the fire escape, like she doesn’t want him to leave then just yet. He spies it in the paper with her name attached a few short days later.

Fisk has an endless amount of time to come up with new plans but, for now, each hit is something in this circular game that only ends when one gets past them long enough for Frank to meet him properly outside the prison gates a final time. That part he doesn’t tell Red or Karen.

For now, they don’t need to know.

 

 

* * *

 

 

August invites a steady thrum of criminal activity on his streets as the sweltering heat decides to be more forgiving of the city this year and starts to let up. It’s Sunday, and he wasn’t going to show up at her door, but the lights were all flicked on when he passed by to collect some of the weapons reserves he keeps on her roof, so he acts on impulse, too wired with ebbing adrenaline. 

She’s got Shining Star playing from her laptop and it makes him chuckle lightly before she follows him into the small space of the kitchen. “Let me see.”

He curses at his aching shoulder as he ignores the demand and pours himself his tenth cup of coffee for the day. “I already patched it up.”

“ _Frank_ ,” she chides, as if she’s irritated with him, but the look on her face gives away her perpetual concern.

He gives in and takes the jacket off, setting it on the counter next to him. She’s in his space then, suddenly, assessing where the bruise peeks out from the arm of his T-shirt. Karen pushes up the cloth further to follow the splotched red path. “How did you get this?”

“Car,” he says with a clenched jaw. Knowing how much worse it could have been, he doesn’t tell her how lucky he is to only get a swollen patch of muscle out of the car’s graze.

She blinks fast. “Seriously?”

“There were a lot of shitbags to keep track of.”

She lets out something like a huff and he has the urge to defend himself more but that dies in the next second when her fingers tease his neckline, pulling the hem there down an inch to assess the cut along his collarbone. He already stitched it up, a shallow but wide cut of a blade. She doesn’t ask after that one, doesn’t say anything as she silently moves to lift up the bottom hem far enough to get a proper look at his ribs. 

There weren’t any problems with his lungs, but he’s having a problem remembering to breathe now, watching her as she watches him and willing himself not to track the warmth of her touch where she keeps pressing against him, thumb skimming one of bruises near his stomach now. “You should be more careful with your ribs.”

He waits, but she’s enraptured studying the mosaic of bruises dotting him there, worrying her lips in thought. Distantly, he considers that she’s right — cracked or broken ribs leads to a lot more downtime than bleeding out does — but she skims her thumb across one of the bruises higher up on his chest this time and he knows why she’s doing it, knows she’s feeling for the inflammation, but he can’t take it anymore, can’t take _this_.

One of his hands grip her elbow. “ _Ma’am_.”

Karen smiles as if she’s readying to chide him again. “I know. You’ll live.” Dropping his shirt, she lifts her gaze, mouth poised open to add another observation, tease, something, but she falters when her eyes meet his. 

Embarrassment claws up his neck and threatens to choke him properly as he fears what she sees. Someone broken, dangerous, or worse — someone _lost_.

She’s got her hand pressing against his chest still and it’s a weight he doesn’t want to lose as the devastation hits him that as soon as they blink, as soon as they separate, they’re going to have to part for good. 

He’s going to have to leave her.

They can’t have feelings like this, not ones that put that craving look on her face and beg him to hold her close again. There’s no future in this or for them the way they are. She has a power to bring the most sanity out of him than anyone, and by some mystery the increase of his presence has made her happier, but he’s still just a shell.

He’ll never be the person she deserves. He can’t give her any future she deserves.

Frank can’t make promises for _any future,_ period. 

His trigger finger is twitching but she drops her stare to his lips and it’s a selfish desire to give into, something only an asshole would do, but he curls his hand around her waist and then she’s leaning and he’s holding her steady as they meet with a hard kiss. Karen presses into him as her hands go to his hair, everywhere she touches setting his skin on fire until he stops trying to think, to keep any sense of perspective and simply shuts off his mind instead to focus on her.

He smooths his hands up her back, mapping the curve of her spine as her arms drop away from his hair, something he could miss if her tongue didn’t skim his lip and then he pulls her ever closer with a groan as he deepens the kiss. She’s got her hands on his shirt again as he tastes her — _vanilla_ , she’s the vanilla of the creamer she keeps to destroy her coffee with when she’s not using it to keep her awake, and he’d hated it before but it’s perfect on her now — but then she’s pulling it up, palms on his bare chest again, and enough of his mind is alert to make him break contact.

Somehow Frank missed it before, but in the process she’s come lean against him with her legs between his and he stares down at that as he recovers his breath, forehead pressed against hers. She shudders slightly and he pulls back just enough to look at her eyes, finds them blown wide and anxious.

“ _Stay_ ,” she implores, a gasp within the word.

They don’t ask each other for these promises. 

He can’t make them. He shouldn’t. 

But he wants to.

Warm and solid, she wraps her arms around him slowly, as if she’s afraid he’s going to step away. He can’t possibly begin to get his legs cooperating when she’s soothing him this way. It’s not absolute as his head stays full of chaos, screaming every reason for why they’re doomed, why he’s doomed and how he could drag her down with him if he’s not careful, but he thinks maybe it’s enough. 

 _Just for now_ , it can be enough. It doesn’t have to mean he’ll put her in danger just yet. 

His hands slide down to her hips as he rests his head against her shoulder and she curves against him, lowers her head along his. “ _I’m right here,_ ” he says, making a promise he’d kill anyone to keep. “I’m right here.” 

Her hands tighten on his shoulders as she sighs in relief.

 

 

* * *

 

 

It’s a day, then it’s a week, and a month, and Frank keeps waiting for the next shoe to drop, for the reality of the situation to fully sink into his gut and rear its ugly head of dread once more until it’s drowned him enough to make him walk away, to pull him away. He waits for something, _anything_ , to go wrong.

But. Nothing happens.

Red doesn’t let up the lectures and judgments. If he wasn’t such a morally hypocritical prick the rest of the time, Frank would throw him a bone and admit that he agrees with everything the devil has to say on the topic. They’re not _normal_ — he’s not going to stop being The Punisher and Karen’s not going to stop being a bold reporter that lands in hot water more often than not — but in some kind of fucked up way, it’s worked, and it keeps working, plans for a future be damned.

It’s not normal, but he tells Red to fuck off every time he starts in anyway.

Frank resigns himself to the reality that right and wrong here don’t exist here. The start and the end of it is Karen next to him. He stops trying to understand it.

_It just is._

 

 

* * *

 

  

An innocent spring day has the sun sparkling and birds chirping and Frank Jr.’s got his chalk out as he sketches elementary renditions of the stars and constellations into the uneven stones of the backyard as they move around him, muttering to himself all the while with laser focus until Lisa accidentally steps across them and then he’s crying out, young cheeks pinched red with indignation.

They knew it would happen, warned Lisa, but then Maria’s calling Lisa away and Frank’s showing his boy how to fix it, asks to be shown which constellations are which, and it’s a flip of a switch between the cries and the loud teachings as he rambles off mispronounced gods and goddesses and animals, enraptures Frank for what feels like forever until it all tips forward into the desert and he’s still on his stomach but this time he’s alone, struggling to stand, struggling to see anything or _anyone_ through the sand winds whipping around him as he yells out their names until his throat’s raw—

Frank sits up so fast his head spins, throat dry as paper, and he startles when Karen puts a gentle hand on his arm. She’s sitting on the side of the bed, legs folded underneath with hair mussed but different clothes on and he wonders absently how long she’s been up. He could ask, but he skirts his wild-eyed gaze away from hers as she moves to hold him. 

She’s slow, methodical in case he tells her no, and he _should_ because he can’t help feeling that it’s wrong, but he burrows against her anyway as he washes the nightmare out of his eyes.

He was getting better at sensing them, sensing when they’d come — when something set him off, when his mood was just right — so that he wouldn’t be here. So he wouldn’t make her feel troubled by them.

They were his haunting moments of torture and his alone.

She pulls back when he lifts his head. “You want coffee?” It’s said as a question, but the answer never changes so she doesn’t wait for it, just moves to get up. He watches her silently for a moment before his gaze lowers.

Karen never asks about what he sees or if he’s okay. He’s volunteered a few times with some of the nightmares and the distortion of memories that they are when he knows he’s yelled aloud, when she’s had to shake him awake, but that’s been the rare happenstance and almost always when she’s already up and moving, gone from his side. It’s exactly why he doesn’t want her to see him like this.

The last thing he wants is to scare her.

She’s at the counter, fetching a small treat for Max where he lays half-asleep near the door before moving through the motions as she pours out grounds, and Frank manages to stand on steady feet and pull on a shirt over the newest set of sickly bruises covering his chest before joining her. He rests his hands on the edge of the counter behind him and leans against it as he watches her put the coffee on brew. Stepping over to wash her hands, she doesn’t look at him, and he considers not for the first time that maybe this is _worse_.

He doesn’t want her to feel scared, but she’s stuck outside a wall instead.

The last one he has left. 

His chest feels as though an anvil is sitting atop it, but he musters the urge to open his mouth. “I can’t stop them.”

She stills for a moment at the sink, takes a beat before turning the water off. Wiping her hands, she turns around and faces him properly, a faint frown etched into her cheeks. “I can’t control my dreams either, Frank.”

“That’s not—” With a twitch, he dips his head, shakes it from side to side for a minute before he swallows. “I mean I won’t feel better about it being my fault. Ever. _I can’t fix what I did_ ,” he confesses as his throat rumbles and cracks.

Brows furrowed, her blues mirror his pain within them. “…What do you mean?” 

“What you heard in the forest, it….” His fingers alight with anxiety, trigger beating erratically as he tries to stay right here in front of her. “Schoonover targeted my family over a grudge, because of me,” he chokes and hates that he’s finally given voice to it, finally said it aloud, because it tears through it, the guilt and self-loathing festering anew. He meets he stare straight on, stops skittering around and away from it. “What happened in _Kandahar_ …. It wasn’t just about heroin.”

Karen swallows, shifts as if she wants to reach out, but he needs the distance between them, needs the distance of perspective in order to observe her every reaction. It’s habit and it’s the only thing keeping him from giving into the violent emotions threatening to take him over right now, the ones that assault him day in and day out despite her most calming touch. She must see something of that in him, or maybe he’s just hoping she does, because she leans back against the opposite counter and tilts her head. “ _Tell me_.” 

She’s never asked since the forest last November, not like that, and the words are soft without any demands but it’s still a heavy request as she stands there, open and willing and waiting. It’s the last wall he’s got and her view of him will be forever changed — forever complete, he thinks might be more fitting — and that’s a dangerous amount of power to give over.

But. It’s only dangerous if it’s anyone else but _her_.

Her shoulders start to sag. Frank opens his mouth.

He doesn’t leave out a single detail.

**Author's Note:**

> THANK YOU SO MUCH TO EVERYONE THAT HAS READ THIS SERIES!!!! I didn't expect to expand it this way but it was so much fun to explore before our next pieces of canon. Because of the Defenders with Karen, and then The Punisher series coming out soon (!!!!!!!!!) this is definitely, for good, the final part.
> 
> It sounds weird, but I seriously can't recommend contrasting Frank's POV with Karen's in this universe enough. It was a hell of an exercise for my brain to have these two different perspectives keep crossing paths and yet stay so distinct. (The Punisher is going to bless us so much you guys ;a;)
> 
> REAL TALK- I actually ended up sitting on this for months with it half-written because despite the fact that this one (as opposed to Karen's) keeps the same sort of ending I conjured at the beginning, the journey there with Frank was...intense. Well at least in my head, woops. Balancing his emotions, triggers, drives, and determinations really left me nervous AF in this because - well Frank isn't balanced, is he? He struggles with all of it and he's broken, recognizing and justifying that in different ways, influenced so much by that inferno of emotions within him, too.... Sad murder son. ANYWAY, what I'm trying to say is that I really, sincerely, foolishly hope that he came across okay and that this is all at least semi-understandable!!
> 
> I hope everyone enjoyed reading this, too, and it's somehow a little bit worth that horrible wait! Thank you again!!! \o/


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